The site at Foulksrath in County Kilkenny exists, for now, only as a cropmark, a ghostly outline that became visible from the air on 10 July 1973, captured on aerial photographs taken as part of a Cambridge University survey. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried ditches or pits alter the moisture and nutrient content of the soil above them, causing the plants that grow there to mature at a slightly different rate or colour than the surrounding crop. From ground level, there is nothing to see; from the air, the past briefly surfaces.

The feature is classified as a ring-ditch, a type of circular enclosure defined by a shallow ditch, often all that survives of a prehistoric burial monument after centuries of farming have levelled whatever once stood at its centre. Ring-ditches in Ireland are generally associated with Bronze Age funerary activity, though their precise original form, whether a barrow, a cairn, or some other structure, can rarely be determined without excavation. What makes this particular example quietly striking is the company it keeps. The surrounding landscape around Foulksrath is remarkably dense with similar features; more than a dozen comparable ring-ditches have been recorded in the immediate vicinity, suggesting that this stretch of the Nore valley was, at some point in prehistory, a place of considerable ceremonial or commemorative significance. Tillage farming, which brings subsoil closer to the surface and occasionally damages buried archaeology, also happens to be what makes these cropmarks legible in the first place, lending the whole situation a certain irony.